'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' Movie is Finally Getting a Sequel...Kinda

Remember four years ago, when David Fincher made an English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s mega-bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? It’s a pretty good movie, Rooney Mara got an Oscar nomination for her performance in the title role, and you’d really think that a film based on such a massively read book would’ve been a runaway blockbuster. Alas, that didn’t happen. The film struggled at the box office, and the future of the franchise seemed murky at best. Now, Sony Pictures thinks they know how to revive it.

Instead of inviting Fincher, Mara, and co-star Daniel Craig back for another film, the studio’s apparently looking to just skip them and the other two books in Larsson’s original trilogy and jump right to an adaptation of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a continuation of Larsson’s novels written by David Lagercrantz. No one’s been officially recast as computer hacker Lisbeth Salander yet, but The Wrap reports that Sony is particularly interested in Alicia Vikander, who’s riding high right now after breaking out big time in the acclaimed Ex Machina this year.

Casting Vikander and passing over high-priced names like Fincher and Craig would make the film a good bit cheaper than its $90 million predecessor, and if it works this time Sony wants to then move forward with The Girl Who Played with Fire, Dragon Tattoo’s intended sequel which already has a rather expensive script.

So, the Salander franchise is getting an attempt at a reboot. I wouldn’t expect anything less from the studio who brought us The Amazing Spider-Man 2.